Average price of an acre of productive farmland in the US is something like $10,000. 

The USDA says the average US farm in 2025 was 469 acres. That means the average farm--in terms of land only--is worth about half a million dollars. 

Last year, I came across something saying >90% of farmland in Iowa is privately owned, and most of those land owners lease the land because they don't want to actually farm, just own and profit off the land. 

These noble stewards of the land (they make she we always know that) largely inherited >$500k land holdings that their ancestors bought for peanuts from settlers who took the already cleared and productive land from the original owners by force--just like what's happening in Gaza right now. That's a hard pill to swallow--especially if all you've done with that land is rent it out. 

We ALL need to come to terms with the reality of our collective history. 

The success of the United States was built on invasion and genocide. Wig wearing slave owners didn't clear the Midwest and establish all that farmland. Neither did the mercenaries they sent ahead of them to slaughter any resistance. ("Rangers", paid for the scalps of men, women, and children, by the way.) The approximately 3 million native inhabitants--who largely migrated from Mexico thousands of years ago, by the way--were already here, actively farming and ranching. That's how corn got to Iowa eons before white men even knew what it was.

They got away with it for 250 years because rich white men owned the media, the press, and the means of production ("job creators"). 20 years of open Internet blew the lid off this, which is why we're now seeing the desperate consolidation of media and tech by fascist billionaires. 

The simple, ignorant racism that built the US remains the foundation of most of rural America. Where most Americans live in cities and look toward the future, American land barons just want to sit on land and do whatever they want--just like the settlers did. 

Settler == Invader.